Why Do We Fetishize Manufacturing Jobs?
Could there maybe be other jobs that big, brawny dudes can do?
The White House is launching a program of national self-harm in the hope of “bringing back” manufacturing jobs. If successful,1 more Americans will realize their dream of slogging to an industrial building every morning to repeat the same small task trillions if not jillions of times until they wish they were dead. Anyone who has seen old photos of filth-covered Industrial Age kids toiling in a thimble factory and thought “they had it pretty sweet” should prepare to rejoice. Let China dominate electric cars and solar power — America will be number one in building toasters, gloves, and shitty plastic toys that you buy at CVS to keep your kids quiet on a car trip.
Many Americans fetishize manufacturing jobs. One of the few things that the left and the right agree on is that we absolutely must — MUST! — have more manufacturing jobs. It’s a national imperative to have more burly guys in denim working in buildings filled with sparks and big metal hooks that hang from chains — that can’t just exist in Dr. Scholl’s ads and ‘80s metal videos. This is agreed to by MAGA freaks, low-T liberals, normie dipshits, and grad school socialists who wouldn’t work in a factory if their job was to operate the Free Blowjob Machine. That economic health is synonymous with manufacturing jobs is received wisdom, like breakfast being the most important meal of the day and that torture should be reinstated for people who make spam calls.
Why? What’s magic about those particular jobs? Why are we about to damage our economy in pursuit of jobs in a certain sector — shouldn’t we be after good jobs regardless of sector? Shouldn’t the fact that the “decline” in American manufacturing has largely coincided with low unemployment and rising real median wages suggest that manufacturing jobs aren’t critical? And what’s up with the scare quotes around “decline” in the previous sentence? Those are there because though the number of manufacturing jobs has decreased by around 30 percent since its peak in the ‘70s, and manufacturing jobs are an ever-smaller percentage of the labor force, American manufacturing output never declined. “We don’t build things anymore” is a myth — we build plenty of stuff as long as “we” includes robots:
